“Our dear Elizabeth was this morning …safely delivered of a fine hearty boy…We…have every prospect of her speedy recovery. We have been delighted to learn the dissolution of the Parliament and that the election in which you are so much interested will soon take place, so as to enable you to return to us in the Autumn, when your son Andrew was so far advanced as to interest you with his little [pranks?]

      Mrs. Willing’s health is improving…Our friend [?] has written you and promises to do so again with full information as to the state of our market for your manufactures. He appears to me of the opinion that our market at present is very dull and that goods for the Autumn sales ought to be bought lower than they have before to increase in profit. The details however I leave to him to communicate but will surely say that monied operations in this country are more difficult than they have been and that the general curtailment of Bank accommodation must have a considerable effect on…foreign manufactures during the coming season. You ought therefore to buy on very low terms…the probable fall of prices. At present everything is nominal, the heat of summer preventing the County dealers from visiting…Some of your prints by the [Jane?] which [?] sold, have been returned as damaged by the operations of printing, not by the sea…My Father is making efforts to walk, but rides frequently…without fatigue…”

    The first name of the Willing who signed the letter is difficult to make out, but details in the letter seem to indicate that he was Thomas Mayne Willing, son of the President of the Bank of North America and Mayor of Philadelphia (as was his father) and a founder of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange.  Thomas Mayne writes this letter, mixing personal and business news, to his son-in-law, London merchant John Stirling, who had recently married Willing’s daughter Elizabeth in Philadelphia.  As she was also Stirling’s second cousin, it appears that there had been earlier Anglo-American marriages in the family.

The financial situation to which he refers was the first American “Panic” of the 19^th century, when prices for overproduced American agricultural products began to fall in Europe. Whether or not a result of this downturn, Stirling’s firm went bankrupt, eight years later, which did not apparently affect the fortunes of John Stirling, who brought up his family (including the newly born Andrew) in the oldest home in the Scottish town of St. Andrews, the “Home of Golf”. As a matter of curiosity, Andrew Stirling would die, unmarried, in frontier Australia, at the age of 26; Thomas Mayne Willing would die three years after this letter was written at 55, but only one year later than his 90-year-old horse-riding father. The whole family was one of the richest in Jacksonian America.